My Life as a Night Elf Priest

[Editor’s note: U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, recently singled out the research of Bonnie Nardi, author of the new book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, in his “Wastebook 2010: A Guide to Some of the Most Wasteful Government Spending of 2010” report. The book is based on Nardi’s research on the social culture of online gaming, as paid for by a National Science Foundation grant. Her response follows.] Many readers are probably too young too remember Senator William Proxmire. I am sorry to say he served in the US Senate from […]

The University of Michigan Press has been running a series of blog entries about the online world game World of Warcraft and its new “Cataclysm” expansion/update, which is due to launch later this year, brought you to by the new book My Life as a Night Elf Priest, by Bonnie Nardi. Here Nardi tackles the new areas for players to slowly build their new characters in the Horde faction from levels 15-22, which transform with the release of the expansion. These descriptions are based on the beta test of the newly changed areas. For previous blog entries in this series […]

World of Warcraft rapidly became one of the most popular online world games on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It’s a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people’s characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants. Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a […]

This is the latest in a series of blog posts regarding the upcoming “Cataclysm” update/expansion pack for the online game World of Warcraft. It is based on the beta tests under way now and brought to you by the new book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropologist’s Account of World of Warcraft, by Bonnie Nardi, available now from The University of Michigan Press. Previous blog entries dealt with the new worgen starting area, the new goblin starting area, and Blizzard Entertainment’s aborted attempt to require real life first and last names from the millions of posters on […]

Bonnie Nardi is author of My Life as a Night Elf Priest, a new book on the culture and gameplay of the international bestselling online world game, World of Warcraft. This is the third in a series of blog posts talking about new changes coming in the game. For the first post, describing what the new Worgen race starting area will be like when the game’s “Cataclysm” expansion/upgrade comes later this year, click here. For the entry regarding developer Blizzard Entertainment’s aborted effort to require real names on its user forums, click here. For a description of how “Cataclysm” changes […]